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Concerns about shuttle safety have been largely responsible for 22 major changes in the orbiter's design and as many as 40 more minor changes. "All of the redesign is complete," with a few exceptions, said Wayne Hale, deputy manager of the space shuttle program.

At a staff meeting a group was discussing a MAJOR system that they were just finally getting ready to deploy in a week or two. They mentioned that they had one last meeting in a week to figure out what bugs wouldn't get fixed in the final release.

This was a multi-million-dollar project. Why on earth they were still debating build features a week before deployment I have no idea. Not surprisingly an annoucement was sent out to end-users a month later telling them to expect unusual delays from groups util

Couldn't agree more - you get more ROI if you have more time to use the system.

My issue wasn't with the fact that the system still had bugs. The issue was that they should have figured out what bugs they were going to fix months before, so that they could focus on taking care of the show-stoppers and getting things wrapped up for distribution (trianing, packaging, etc.) You shouldn't be debating another build only a few days before going live - unless you plan on postponing. Otherwise there will be almo

I mean, true, we really do need to get back to our normal routines of spaceflight, but we also need to make sure it's safe and that we're not going to lose any more shuttles due to microfractures or falling ice or whatnot.

Of course, this is also why I think that more effort needs to be put into commercial space vehicles, so as to make spaceflight more commonplace.

Of course, this is also why I think that more effort needs to be put into commercial space vehicles, so as to make spaceflight more commonplace.

The time to privatize space travel is long overdue. There's an immense revenue stream available for private/commercial spaceflight. Bush ought to be directing NASA's efforts AWAY from being an agency of construction/launch management/exploration, and towards being an agency of mostly science/research. Another, much smaller agency, is needed to oversee the comme

There's an immense revenue stream available for private/commercial spaceflight.

Such as?

The only obvious profitable space-based activities are communications satellites and imaging satellites. Both of these have already been privatized.

To address the usual suspects:

1. The novelty of sending rich people into space for jollies is going to wear off real quick. That's not a basis to support an entire space industry.

2. Mining activities don't make sense. The universe is comprised of chemical elements. There are few if any elements available in space that arent' available on earth or can't be substituted by other materials. The only obvious exception, helium isotopes for fusion fuel, would be great except that we most likely won't be using fusion fuel for decades.

Our government said it'd cost $1 trillion to land a dude on Mars and bring him home. That was in the late 1980's, and many of the projects and much of the research that was figured into that $1 trillion figure has already been done. More realistic modern figures place the price tag at $300-$500 billion. Let's be generous and say that it'd cost $450-$750 billion.

Now, that's for the government to do it. Let's not aim so far as Mars, and start with the moon. Cut that figure in half. We're at

Let's compare with one of the largest entertainment driven enterprises in the world: the Olympics. To support itself every 2 years with TV and licensing revenue it generates more hype than most anyone can stand. Their total revenues average out to a couple of $Billion per year. That kind of money isn't going to put a dent in what's required to design, build and run a moon base, whether it's government or private.

First of all, NBC paid almost a billion for two weeks of Olympics coverage 5 years ago. That's just television coverage for two-weeks of an event that happens every four years. What do you think these networks might pay for an event that's never happened before?

ESPN is paying a billion per year for Monday Night Football.

How much do networks pay for the Super Bowl, a one-day event that lasts 3-4 hours? Usually Bowl bids are packaged up with regular rea

Financial analyses of NASA have shown that under 10% of its budget is typically put towards expenses directly related to spaceflight, and the rest is research, bidding, bureaucracy, and government waste. That suggests that the cost for private industry to pull this off is $50 billion.

You've exhibited what I call the Fallacy of Privatization.

Private entities are no where near immune from research, bidding, bureaucracy, and waste.

Research: Can a moon base be constructed completely with off-the-shelf parts

There is no reason to go into space at all. But we still do, because it is human nature to expand, to grow, to learn and to seek out new places to live and exist in. The human race could happily stay on earth for the rest of its existance. We could prop up all the third or second world countries into the state of europe and America, and then stay at that level of development, for we would be content. But we won't - there will always be pioneers going to live on space stations, or the moon, mars or perhaps t

Space travel pushes our need to innovate and leads to many inventions that we enjoy in our normal lives. The need to understand where we are, how we got here and how the universe works doesn't seem like a trivial goal. There are always things we could give up to help the needy. I could be donating my time, instead of posting on/., but oh well. Now if you're talking the tradeoff between the ISS vs. the Super Collider, I could agree.

I don't know how much fuel the shuttles use on a typical mission but the Atlantis has averaged around 407934 miles a day during its lifetime. On the 11 days of the STS-121 mission the MPG is bound to come out at least as good as my car. Does any one know how much fuel it will use and how it compares with gasoline?

This is done in order to give the agency more time to finish paperwork

WTF is it with paper these days? I mean really! We spend more time doing paperwork then we do anything else. Is it REALLY that important to document every little tiny fact of a pointless job? All I hear from the police is "We need more people or we need less paper work" and it seems it applies to everyone.

Would you rather NASA spent hours and hours filling out paper saying how many pins they heard drop this week and how many screws the

The paperwork *is* there to prevent things from going wrong. Specifications make sure that the parts can cope with the stresses of flight. Checklists make sure that the parts that are supposed to be there are there. Imagine how silly NASA would look if the shuttle launced without any food aboard. A spaceflight is basically months upon months of planning followed by a few days in orbit. Without paperwork, how would management know if it was safe to launch?

"Would you rather someone be accountable for an accident or people to just go around and say "uhhh I don't know whose fault it was or what caused the problem because we didn't do any paperwork on it""

But NASA paperwork has been proven to be worthless in the past. In one famous case a few years back there were tools left in the back of the shuttle which could have gone rattling around and caused a fatal accident if they'd hit something vital during the launch.

The worker signed to say they'd taken the tools out of the shuttle. Their supervisor signed to say the tools had been taken out of the shuttle. Their supervisor signed to say the tools had been taken out of the shuttle.

Three people, lots of paperwork... but the tools were still left in the shuttle in spite of it. What's the point of paperwork if three people can sign to attest to something which is blatantly untrue?

If you are going to blame 'someone' you are already doing the wrong thing. Humans make errors, so replacing the human that did the error with another one that will do a similar random error will do nothing to improve the overall situation. To really fix a problem you need to find out how to avoid it in the future, not who is to blame for it. If Jim forgot some screws, the solution is not to replace Jim with Bob, but to let Bob cross check that all

As it clearly states in form A22-31025b-001a sub paragraph 15 the responsibility for this massive screw up occured in a whole different department. Our exhaustive overhaul of the paperwork used in the Shuttle Program (see descriptive Powerpoint presentation scheduled at 12:00), resulted in 14 worker's comp claims for paper cuts. So, as you see, we are right on top of the safety issue..

I don't think anybody at NASA is in a big hurry to be the scapegoat if something goes wrong, so I'm sure they are going over everything to make sure nothing got overlooked. But you really couldn't pay me a billion dollars to go up in that thing unless they put SpaceShipOne in the cargo bay in case of emergency. Even then, it would take a 10 pound Xanax to calm my nerves.

This might have nothing to do with the delay but there has been some pressure on NASA from the Canadian government to change the launch direction (I know... not easy) due to concerns of debris hitting the Hibernia oil platform. They predicted debris landing around 25 miles from the platform. Since this is a non-movable platform it caused some understandable nervousness.

The shuttle launch has nothing to do with the debris hitting the Hibernia oil platform. Those debris concerns are for a USAF satellite launch and sparked a mass evacuation of 3 oil platforms in that area when it was announced. Now they don't know when they'll be launching it due to a "technical" problem

Except your number is off by a factor of 2000 (lbs not tons) and only about 250k lbs actually makes it to orbit (as someone who formerly worked SSP and now ISS).:) Not to discount your point though - isn't bureacracy great?

Last time I worked at NASA, Shuttle was called STS and Station was ISS. When did the insiders start using SSP?
Other than that I agree, more paperwork goes on than real work. In fact if you do some real work your paperwork goes up!:(

As annoying as it is, that paperwork is important. We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost. Of course if you wanted to create a new Saturn V you would start from scratch because you want modern technology, but still it would be helpful to know how any why the Saturn V was done the way it was, and what problems they had to work around.

Even when the paperwork is obsolete it is useful to get a picture of where you were.

Paperwork is your checklist. Many times in my life I thought everything was done until I went through the checklist. If you don't do the paperwork you don't know if you checked everything. It would be really a bummer to find that the main fuel tank was never filled, only "topped off" to replace evaporation/leakage while waiting on the pad. (that is just enough fuel to get off the pad, but not enough to get into space) Only by running through a checklist can you be sure that step was done.

Remember the saturn Moon probe of a few months back where they forgot to put turn the radio on in the checklist? The radio wasn't turned on. There are plenty of major mistakes that only doing the paperwork (annoying as it is) can prevent. Of course doing the paperwork won't find problems that aren't in the checklists. The sheare volume of things that need to be done mean that for minor things you sometimes hope someone did it, but live with it when someone forgets.

We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.

This is incorrect. The Saturn V blueprints are safe and completely intact [space.com] on microfilm at MSFC, where they have been since the 1960s. Nothing at all has been lost. From the link:

"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."

And this is the easiest way to tell people who have worked on critical systems, and those who have not. The later just think they can fix things in production, or if a fuse is wrong it can be replaced. The former live in fear of missing some small detail, or more often a few seemingly trivial details, that will cost the entire project.

Would you rather NASA spent hours and hours filling out paper saying how many pins they heard drop this week and how many screws they may have put in the test models or would you rather they spent that time improve technology so we can all bugger off this planet?

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. If I'm strapped to the top of a rocket, I want to be sure that every seemingly trivial detail has been documented and double-checked.

By the way, one of the reasons that NASA was able to return to flight so quickly after the Apollo 13 incident was that they were able to go back and determine exactly what had caused the oxygen tank in the SM to explode. In looking back through the "paperwork", they were able to determine that there were two separate events (tank dropped two inches, and relays not updated to new pad voltage reqirements) that contributed to the explosion. By the way, the tank dropping incident happened two years before the crew was named!

In the Apollo days, they used to joke that they weren't ready to launch until the pile of paperwork matched the height of the rocket. (363 feet)

These days? The joke in the days of Apollo was that a Saturn V wasn't cleared to launch until the pile of completed paperwork was taller than the launch stack. This isn't new, and may actually be a good sign that NASA is going back toward getting all of the details right prior to launch.

When I co-oped @ the Brown's Ferry Nuclear Plant (you know the one that had the worst accident in the US until 3-Mile came along), the belief was that the NRC required a weight of original reports equal to the weight of the reactor vessel before we could re-start the reactor. There's just something about a bureaucracy that LOVES paper . . . But it IS comforting to know when you live near the reactor that they are crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's.
I'm sure the same is true for the guys that ar

I'm glad to see we're heading back to space. I hope they can start working on more exploration now... like maybe we can send some people to the moon for the first time in my lifetime. The space program needs to really take off (no pun).

As far as I'm concerned, nasa does not really have a good track record for safety, despite all their efforts.

Before challenger blew up, the engineers tried to scrub the launch citing a possibility of the o-rings leaking. Pressure at the highest levels made sure it went as scheduled because before then, they had a flawless record and it was just a possibility and they had their image to maintain.

Of course, there was the investigation and they ultimately had to go lick their wounds. Years later and especially 9/11 later with budget cuts and the space program being scoffed at due to being essentially a money pit when it could be 'better spent', it's not surprising that a few years ago columbia vaporized on re-entry.

It may very well be damaged heat tiles by sheets of ice falling off the main fuel tank during launch which is the official story, but (...dons tin foil hat...) what might not be official is that due to such cuts and possibly a bit of politicking, pressure was put on all sectors of the space program including the 'garage' that inspects and repairs the heat tiles. If it's possible that the garage was under enormous pressure to get the aging columbia ready on time, they might have let a few suspect tiles go which they might not normally have let got and had they been replaced properly, they might have withstood the impact of the ice falling.

The russian space program seems to take the licking, learn from it and move on. Nasa to me seems to shuffle their feet for a while saying to themselves, 'how can we stop *THIS* from happening again?', but should instead ask the question, 'How can we stop accidents from happening again?'.

... is what doomed the Columbia. The carbon-carbon composite leading edge structure of the wings is not really "tiles", and it has been determined for virtually positive certain that a hole knocked into the carbon-carbon structure on the leading edge of the wing is what caused the disaster since the aluminum and stainless steel framework inside the wing melted and burned from within. The only thing that would do that is the superheated plasma gasses being let inside the wing, and the burn patterns of the in

Ahh. The last I had heard on this subject (or cared to hear on this subject) was a heat tile around the location of the landing gear. That's where their attention was focused at the time, but the leading edge of the wing explanation makes more sense.

Thanks for the info. Now my argument doesn't quite hold as much weight.

About a hundred shuttle launches, and only two failed. That's not a bad record if you ask me. The space shuttle is one of the most complicated things people have ever done, both technologically, and politically. The fact that it ever flew at all, much less 100 times, is pretty amazing to me.

Not to say that there hasn't been some silly mistakes (you can make a pretty good argument that the basic design of the shuttle wasn't very practical), but I think NASA's safety record is something for them to be proud

Complexity is no excuse. The Concorde is the most complex airliner ever flown, to this day. That aircraft flew for over 30 years(!) without a single crash. NO other vehicle of any type has ever accomplished that. The engineers expected Challenger to be destroyed on launch. They were off by a little over a minute. Management overruled them. In addition to that, Reagan wanted to have a civilian in space to talk about during the State of the Union Address. The delays were becoming intolerable. Politics destroy

I think complexity is a pretty darn good excuse. The concorde is another impressive engineering feat, no doubt, but I think there's at least one order of magnitude of difference between it and that space shuttle.

I'm not arguing that NASA hasn't made any mistakes. Not even that they haven't made really foolish mistakes. But I think, that overall, the fact that more people haven't died in the space program is rather amazing.

I'm comparing the Concorde to other much less complex aircraft, which crash quite regularly. Usually due to human error. But even with a mechanical problem, that would be due to human(the mechanic or designer) error also. You can bet that part of the Concorde's safety record was due to political pride also. They were super careful with it. Same goes for NASA. The whole world watches ever little move it makes. Nobody wants their name on the next accident.

The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be.

I'd hoped people would see that being my point to begin with. I wasn't trying to say that space launches were inherently safe or unsafe or anything like that.

As for the first disaster, my memory of challenger was that when the dust settled, it was the top dog who said "launch" when the engineers said "don't launch". I wasn't entirely sure about the second, but

Before challenger blew up, the engineers tried to scrub the launch citing a possibility of the o-rings leaking. Pressure at the highest levels made sure it went as scheduled because before then, they had a flawless record and it was just a possibility and they had their image to maintain.

Ok, that's the standard tinfoil hat vesion. Here's the reality: The engineers went to management and asked them to scrub the launch. When asked why, the engineers replied that they had a vague bad feeling that something

EARMARKSPressure on NASAs budget has come not only from the White House, but also from the Congress. In recent years there has been an increasing tendency for the Congress to add "earmarks" - congressional additions to the NASA budget request that reflect targeted Members interests. These earmarks come out of already-appropriated funds, reduci

I find it amusing that at the same time everyone is hand-wringing over the safety factors of the pending shuttle launch, Soyuz is flying to ISS again without fanfare.

I think that says everything there is to say about the US space program.

We're putting a lot of effort to put a lame duck platform back in orbit that is going to be decommissioned in 5 years or so anyway with no clear successor and we just kind of ignore the fact that Russia has a time-tested (but not glamorous) platform with a far better safety record.

Safety-wise, the capsule has many advantages to an orbiter. The shuttle is not at the top so parts of the craft may hit it. Getting the Soyuz capsule away from its booster is fairly simple. It can land ballistically which means aborts don't need to worry about landing strips. The new Crew Vehicle being worked on is another capsule on top of the rocket, like they should have continued using after Apollo, instead of the shuttle programme which has been flawed from the start.

I find it amusing that at the same time everyone is hand-wringing over the safety factors of the pending shuttle launch, Soyuz is flying to ISS again without fanfare.

In two out of five Soyuz flights since the loss of Columbia there have been significant accidents. The world at large is ignorant of them because the made niether the front page of CNN nor even Slashdot.

We're putting a lot of effort to put a lame duck platform back in orbit that is going to be decommissioned in 5 years or so anyway with no

2 questions: why does mankind have to surive the next billion years, or rather, why is it the job of an agency of the US governement to assure such a thing?

2) since multi-cellular organisms didn't really take off until almost half that amount of time ago (600million years ago), primates didn't walk on 2 feet until 4 million years ago (1/250th of that billion years), what in the world^H^H^H^H^H universe makes you think humankind will be around a billion years from now? Whatever is around then will be well beyond our capability to understand or predict. I mean, our species is only 50k years old (1/20,000th of that billion) and already in that span of time has evolved *considerably*. We don't even look like we did 200 years ago, much less 2,000. Do you really think we'll be anything like this 50,000 years from now, and that we'll be even remotely the same *species* as this a million years from now (1/1000th of that billion years). If not, who are you to dictate what their survival will require? Maybe within the next few thousand years we'll finally start doing population control, for instance. There's an idea. All other species seem to do just fine...we should be able to figure it out too, being "smarter" than them.

I hope we can evolve into something else within the next thousand that allows us to not need fragile, biological bodies. Imagine the possibilities - instead of being in a spaceship you could BE the spaceship. Transfer the mind to a new machine, and then you can be the rover.

It's probably the only way we'll actually have a life off this planet.

We can though perhaps create highly-developed AI's, program/train them in our mores, and then set them loose - thereby creating a wholy seperate type of existence. But evolution is a biological mechanism, and (at least, in just the next thousand years) won't allow us to stop being biological.

What you're talking about could happen easily enough in a VR system, though...imagine humans in little pods, fed efficiently, with equiptment connected dir

the scary part is that it wouldn't be that hard to keep a body perfectly healthy for a very very long time, if in a perfectly controlled environment. We are already somewhat close to being able to fix a lot of things through GE methods; imagine if you ate the most perfect, healthy food at the precisely perfect times, had your health monitored 24/7, were given only the cleanest air at precisely the ideal mixture of oxygen and other gases, and never had to worry about car wrecks or other such things? The hu

### But evolution is a biological mechanism, and (at least, in just the next thousand years) won't allow us to stop being biological.

Evolution has for most part already slowed down a lot or stoped for humans, so I wouldn't expect any major change any time soon anyway. What however will happen sooner or later is that we ourself construct our future development. We are already growing organs (just little pieces of skin, but its a start), transplanting organs and constructing mechanical prosthesis, its just a

slowed down? It's gone *insanely* fast. Keep timeline in context; life started 3.5 billion years ago. Humanity's first written language was only 6k years ago -.5Millionth of life's entire time.

There's considerable difference between how we were 50k years ago, and how we are now. That we're the same species means ONLY one thing - that we could reproduce with them, and that our offspring could in turn reproduce with either of us. Horses and donkeys (and Zebras) are not the same species because while th

It IS recent. But recent makes no difference. We're not arguing about things that happened in the past. We're talking about things that will happen in the future. If something started YESTERDAY it could be the determining factor.

Look at the troubles we face today. Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place. It doesn't exist for a modern society. In essence, by the time a species is smart enough to realize the concept of evolution, they'll have stopped evolving.

### Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place.

Birth rate in germany is currently ~1.6 per female if I remember correctly, if we continue that way we are extingt in around ~500 years if my math is right. One might call that evolution, but it goes in quite another direction than expected, since wealth has little todo with how far once genes spread these days.

Look at the troubles we face today. Point out ANYTHING that would cause natural selection to take place. It doesn't exist for a modern society. In essence, by the time a species is smart enough to realize the concept of evolution, they'll have stopped evolving.

No - we just changed the rules. Assuming that society doesn't collapse, I'm sure we'll be able to comprehensively control our genetic makeup. That will have a huge impact on what the human race looks like.

### slowed down? It's gone *insanely* fast. Keep timeline in context; life started 3.5 billion years ago. Humanity's first written language was only 6k years ago -.5Millionth of life's entire time.

Cultural evolution of course has gone insanely fast, biological evolution on the other side doesn't seem to have made much changes for quite a while and I don't see how it ever should in an industrial nation, after all your survival and your reproduction has little or nothing todo with your genes. Humans might o

it has a lot to do with genes; while not all of intelligence is genetic, a good portion of it is. There are all sorts of traits that make it more likely that someone will have both the financial resources, and the inclination, to create GM kids. Those kids will be the next step in our evolution.

That, and it's silly to say we're not evolving anymore, because we're industrialized or something. What part of "we're only 50k years old..." is hard to grasp? It took 600 million years for the multi-celled orgs

### while not all of intelligence is genetic, a good portion of it is.

The problem (feature?!) with evolution is that doesn't care if you are intelligent, it cares if your genes spread and intelligence doesn't seem to help all that much with that any longer. Current brith rate in germany for example is ~1.6 per female, meaning we will be extinct sooner or later if it continues that way. It doesn't mean we are not intelligent or that we all die a early, it simply means that our culture evoled into a state wh

Social evoltuion is different than biological evolution. There's no real evidence that we're biologically different than our pre-tech ancestors of 10000 years ago. Nutrition and culture account for some amazing changes.

There's no evidence of biological change. The evidence is that the change is not biological. The evidence is that the changes, instead of being biological, is due to changes in nutrition and culture.

There's no difference in bone structure, brain size in the last 130,000 years. There's very little difference in brain size between modern humans and Homo Erectus (some Homo Erectus skulls are a normal size for a man), which goes back over 1 million years.

I'm not talking about the we as in those of us alive now: but say, some time in the future, a 'cyborg' is created by instead of using AI for the machine, they grow human brain tissue connected to the right interfaces that can be connected to various useful machine body parts. Eventually, that cyborg may down the line create new versions of itself that are entirely machines once technology has advanced in such a way you can make the brain of the machine out of something other than meat.

Maybe within the next few thousand years we'll finally start doing population control, for instance.

Simple population control is not a good idea. I just saw a news story about the declining population in Europe. In the future, that will include the total population, including the immigrants. If we are to survive as a species, we must infest the entire galaxy. We need as many people as possible. The planet can easily sustain 20 billion people. With proper use of technology, there will be no shortages. This

The good old sun will continue to burn for quite a while and good old earth would also be able to support us for quite a bit longer. There is really no reason to start to evacuate to other planets any time soon. The problem is that menkind still hasn't even learned to live happily on this one planet, we extingt species, polute the air, wreak havok the eco system, start major wars every few years. If we continue that way menkind will have itself extingt much before sun even starts to cause throuble.